The most celebrated literary figure of nineteenth-century New Orleans was George Washington Cable. From his early work on mixed-race mothers coping with their light-skinned daughters’ abilities to pass back and forth between white and black communities to his discovery and national dissemination via Scribner’s to his masterpiece, The Grandissimes, its hostile reception in Creole New Orleans, and Cable’s consequent departure from the city and then his final reconciliation: Cable’s life stands as the most literary life in the New Orleans of that era. Cable’s engagement with the issue of race presages some of the discourse surrounding the topic today, with his particular attention to institutional racism and the often subtle, even unconscious ways that racism is perpetuated in ordinary, daily life.

Several figures led efforts by a white, Creole community in New Orleans in the late nineteenth century to preserve and perpetuate their Francophone literary traditions, particularly as they came to see its authority and significance eclipsed by the considerable fame of a writer who criticized their culture, George Washington Cable. Other factors added to these writers’ sense of increasing marginalization, including the fading of the French language from the workaday realities of ordinary life in the city, and the closing of French publishing companies as well. The efforts to rally against this marginalization led to public tension with Cable, which in turn launched the career of Grace King.